The Wayne County Board of Commissioners will create a task force to look into how cost overruns for the the now-stalled jail project reached nearly $100 million. / Kathleen Galligan/Detroit Free Press

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Detroit Free Press Staff Writer

The Wayne County Board of Commissioners will create a task force to look into how cost overruns for the now-stalled jail project reached nearly $100 million.

Though county officials on Thursday laid out options for moving forward with the project, the Jail Task Force could recommend other options for the project going forward.

“Moving the jail to Mound Road may be what the administration is exploring most closely at the moment, but the Jail Task Force will be taking an independent look at what the best next move is on behalf of taxpayers,” commission Chairman Gary Woronchak, D-Dearborn, said in a news release Thursday morning.

In 2010, the County Commission voted to build a $300-million state-of-the-art jail off Gratiot near I-375 based on projections that the facility would save the county $28 million a year through consolidating three other jails and using fewer deputies to run the facility. Instead, county officials received a report in late May from AECOM, the project manager, saying the cost of the project had skyrocketed.

County officials ordered a halt on construction of the five-floor, 2,000-bed facility a week after receiving the AECOM report. Construction contracts with Walbridge-dck were terminated last month as county officials sort through options for continuing the project. Those options include asking for the extra $91 million needed to build the jail to previously agreed-upon specifications, exploring plans from three companies that submitted responses to the county’s request for information, or moving the jail and courthouse, along with 36th District Court, to the state’s semi-vacant Mound Road Correctional Facility, east of I-75.

“The commission needs to know how this happened, what went wrong and who’s responsible,” McNamara said. “The processes ... need to change in order for this to never happen again.”

An independent review of the project by Bloomfield Hills consulting engineers Hubbell, Roth & Clark concluded, among other things, that AECOM was required to design the project within the initial $220-million guaranteed maximum price.

Bids received for work made it apparent that the cap would be exceeded. Based on the contract, AECOM was to work with Walbridge-dck to keep costs under the cap. The consultants said they did not find evidence that such efforts occurred.

During the work stoppage, the county received five responses to a request for information on the site, including one each from Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert’s Rock Ventures group; Triple Properties Detroit, which owns the Penobscot Building, and one from Todd Fenton, a former employee with the Wayne County Economic Development Growth Engine.